Big Brother Britain

[Keyboard_Commando]

{QUOTE-> An astonishing £380 a minute will be spent on surveillance in a massive expansion of the Big Brother state.

The £200million-a-year sum will give officials access to details of every internet click made by every citizen - on top of the email and telephone records already available.

It is a 1,700 per cent increase on the cost of the current surveillance regime

State bodies including councils are already making one request every minute to spy on the phone records and email accounts of members of the public.

The number of snooping missions carried out by police, town halls and other government departments has rocketed by 44 per cent in two years to a rate of 1,381 new cases every day.

Ministers say the five-year cost of the existing regime is £55.61million, an average of £11million a year.

This is paid to phone companies and service providers to meet the cost of keeping and providing private information about customers.

The cost of the new system emerged in a series of Parliamentary answers.

It is to cover payments to internet service providers so they can store mountains of information about every customer for a minimum of 12 months, and set up new systems to cope.

The actual content of calls and emails is not be kept - only who they were from or to, when they took place and where they were sent from.

Police, security services and other public authorities can then request access to the data as part of investigations.

Some 653 bodies are currently allowed access, including councils, the Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service and fire authorities and prison governors.

The new rules allowing access to internet records will be introduced by Parliament before the end of the year.

They are known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme.

Ministers had originally wanted to store the information on a massive Government-run database, but chose not to because of privacy concerns.

Yesterday Alex Deane, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: 'The Government is preparing to make British people pay through the nose so that they can track our movements online.'

<-QUOTE}

{QUOTE-> But a Home Office spokesman said the costs involved were entirely separate from those necessary to comply with the European Data Retention Directive, which requires the storage of phone and email records.

'Communications data is crucial to the fight against crime and keeping people safe,' he added.

'We have made clear that there are no plans to collect and hold the content of everyone's communications.'

There were 504,073 made last year to intercept email and telephone records under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. It was passed ostensibly to fight terrorism.

But it has been used to spy on people suspected of putting their bins out on the wrong day, dropping litter and attempting to cheat school catchment area rules.

<-QUOTE}

source (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1221839/State-spying-cost-200m-year-track-online-move.html?ITO=1490&referrer=yahoo) ^^

Intercept Modernisation Programme (http://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Intercept_Modernisation)

[I no more than U]

It just gives me a warm, tingly, and secure feeling to know our governments care so much about our well-being, like we're their children. My mom and dad died a long time ago, and this just brings back a flood of memories.

[ThunderZ]

{QUOTE-> It just gives me a warm, tingly, and secure feeling to know our governments care so much about our well-being, like we're their children. My mom and dad died a long time ago, and this just brings back a flood of memories. <-QUOTE}


;D LMAO Just what I wanted at my age, new step-parents.

I`m in the U.S. but this, and worse is coming to every developed Country of the world.

[Meriadoc]

lol

afraid alot of sheep people just willingly give up more and more of their freedom and liberty to the idea of 'keeping people safe'. Can I hear the shouts of BB (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four).

[SafetyFirst]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4rBDUJTnNU


:gack:

[Fly]

{QUOTE-> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4rBDUJTnNU


:gack: <-QUOTE}

I watched it. Unfortunately, the 'total surveillance' is much more sophisticated these days. It's still a problem to make sense of all the data, but that will change. It probably won't be long till everyone is chipped and has a GPS unit implanted. :gack:

Unless it is stopped, but I don't see that happening.

[Chuck57]

I'm convinced Orwell and his book, 1984, was only a couple of decades too soon. It's here.

I use PGP for all my email and have some utterly worthless stuff encrypted on my computers in hopes that Uncle Sam's goons will some day appear demanding access, or wanting to know why I'm encrypting my mail. You know, "if you got nothing to hide, why are you doing it?"

Some day, those morons in Washington are going to discover that we put them there to work for us. We're their bosses; they aren't our rulers.

[Keyboard_Commando]

{QUOTE->

I`m in the U.S. but this, and worse is coming to every developed Country of the world. <-QUOTE}

So very true. Britain seems to have become the template. I was watching Fox News the other day ... I occasionally do (no political inferences plz :P ) ... Fox did a feature on some town in Britain that has like 200 CCTV cameras trained on the main shopping mall of this place in question, so this clip ends, it cuts away to the presenter ... and I got the sense the presenters were pushing the view "SEE PEOPLE, CCTV WILL ERADICATE CRIME IF YOU ONLY GIVE IT THE CHANCE <3" They did mention the Big Brother angle, too. But eh!

My dad was always telling me that CCTV is good when we would get into these 1984 debates - over these cameras. The mentality of "if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to worry about" I grew up on. You should hear him now! His point of view has 180'd.

[Meriadoc]

Another form of control. CCTV cameras are everywhere in the UK, they look awful, for a start.
{QUOTE-> Unfortunately, the 'total surveillance' is much more sophisticated these days. It's still a problem to make sense of all the data, but that will change. <-QUOTE}
Oh yes, it certainly will, massive budgets and resources are used to perfect the technology. A 'new world order' at one time was something conspiracy theorists were said to believe in - now you hear it in speeches by our leaders all the time. Over time things get put in place ready for the time the real leaders, the elitists who control our presidents and prime ministers, make that 'corporate takeover' they worry about people power so things like this are done - but I better not get started on that. I read the other day about how Obama will be able to switch off the internet in the US any time he wants all in the name of security. Free speech on the internet will be no more and a user may have the plug pulled in the name of 'cyber bullying.' It seems a constant whittling away of the bill of rights, something that is supposed to protect its citizens. Same here and all over.

[Dogbiscuit]

In the NY Times today is one British family's story.

{QUOTE-> Indeed, Ms. Paton learned what had happened only later, when officials summoned her to discuss her daughter’s school application. To her shock, they produced the covert surveillance report and the family’s telephone billing records. <-QUOTE}{QUOTE-> “They promptly ushered us out of the room,” she said. “As I stood outside the door, they said, ‘You go and tell your friends that these are the powers we have.’ ” <-QUOTE}
Article (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/world/europe/25surveillance.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all)

[chronomatic]

New World Order. I have never been one to believe the kooks, but I think the kooks were right on this time. The NWO is definitely here and it will only get worse.

[I no more than U]

{QUOTE-> In the NY Times today is one British family's story.


Article (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/world/europe/25surveillance.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all) <-QUOTE}

If you've done nothing wrong then you shouldn't mind being followed around for 3 weeks while someone takes notes on everything that you do. Sheesh, what's with all the whining?

And if that "officer from the Poole education department" has done nothing wrong, s/he shouldn't mind being trailed and spied on for a few weeks, which is exactly what should be done. "No, 'officer', I'm not following you. We just happened to be in the same place at the same time." Sometimes, to teach someone a lesson, you have to give them a taste of their own medicine (and scare the crap out of them in the process).

Call me an anarchist, but they wouldn't be able to pull something like that on me.

[Keyboard_Commando]

I found quite an interesting document by The London School of Economics titled Interception Modernisation Programme, it's a PDF file http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/informationSystems/research/policyEngagement/IMP_Briefing.pdf Just a Heads up: that is a direct link to the PDF file

{QUOTE-> The UK Presidency of the EU in 200511 pushed a mandatory regime through the European Union in the form of Directive 2006/24/EC, on "the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC". The Directive was careful to note that this did not require CSPs to collect information that they do not already collect, but rather it focuses on requiring CSPs to retain specific types of information amongst those that they already manage. <-QUOTE}

{QUOTE-> Since 2007, this has required telephone companies to retain specific items of communications data for a period of six months to two years, and internet service providers have their own list of specific data types to retain. The full Directive has been part of UK law since April 2009 <-QUOTE}


{QUOTE-> In their consultation paper regarding the Interception Modernisation Programme, Protecting the Public in a Changing Communications Environment the Home Office says:

“Communications data is information about a communication. It does not include the content of a communication. It can show when a communication happened, where it came from and where it was going, but it cannot show what was said or written […] For a given telephone call, communications data can include the telephone numbers involved, and the time and place the call was made, but not what was said. For an e-mail it might include the
e-mail address from which the message was sent, and where it was sent to, but not the content of the e-mail.”


What is “communications data”?

In this sense, communications data consists of:

• Trafic data – information about communications
• Service use data – which includes telephone call records, itemized billing, records of connections to the Internet
• Subscriber data – information held by CSPs about individuals such as who owns what phone number or owns a particular email account, together with their home
address etc <-QUOTE}

The actual definition appears in s 21(4) of RIPA:

In this Chapter “communications data” means any of the following—
(a) any traffic data comprised in or attached to a communication (whether by the
sender or otherwise) for the purposes of any postal service or telecommunication
system by means of which it is being or may be transmitted;
(b) any information which includes none of the contents of a communication (apart
from any information falling within paragraph (a)) and is about the use made by any
person—
(i) of any postal service or telecommunications service; or
(ii) in connection with the provision to or use by any person of any telecommunica-
tions service, of any part of a telecommunication system;
(c) any information not falling within paragraph (a) or (b) that is held or obtained, in
relation to persons to whom he provides the service, by a person providing a postal
service or telecommunications service.
Sections 21(6) and (7) provide detail on the sub-set of communications data known as
“traffic data”:
(6) In this section “traffic data”, in relation to any communication, means—
(a) any data identifying, or purporting to identify, any person, apparatus or location to
or from which the communication is or may be transmitte

(b) any data identifying or selecting, or purporting to identify or select, apparatus
through which, or by means of which, the communication is or may be transmitted,
(c) any data comprising signals for the actuation of apparatus used for the purposes
of a telecommunication system for effecting (in whole or in part) the transmission of
any communication, and
(d) any data identifying the data or other data as data comprised in or attached to a
particular communication,
but that expression includes data identifying a computer file or computer program ac-
cess to which is obtained, or which is run, by means of the communication to the ex-
tent only that the file or program is identified by reference to the apparatus in which it
is stored.
(7) In this section—
(a) references, in relation to traffic data comprising signals for the actuation of appa-
ratus, to a telecommunication system by means of which a communication is being
or may be transmitted include references to any telecommunication system in which
that apparatus is comprised; and
(b) references to traffic data being attached to a communication include references to
the data and the communication being logically associated with each other;
and in this section “data”, in relation to a postal item, means anything written on the
outside of the item.


------------------------------------------------



{QUOTE-> Who grants interception warrants and authorises release of
communications data?

Is there still a case for maintaining the dominating role of the Home Secretary of the day in granting interception warrants? On the 2007 figures from the Interception Commissioner, there is an average of over 5 interception warrants are granted each day of the year – and all of them should require careful scrutiny. We remain to be convinced of the case for allowing SROs within the organisation to authorise release of communications data to investigations being carried out by their colleagues. We have sought to show that both of these roles are a function of history, in effect a carry-over from the notion of “royal prerogative”. None of the people involved have any judicial experience, do not appear to have any significant training or technical knowledge to assist in discharging the role and have such a range of other duties that it is questionable that they will always have the time to apply their minds to the immediate problems of a warrant or authorisation at the time when they are approached to issue one.

Is there not a compelling case for passing the task over to the judiciary, who exercise these powers in almost every other sphere of potential intrusion into private life? “Lesser” intrusions would go before a magistrate or district judge; deeper intrusions would go to a Crown Court judge. A “lesser” intrusion might correspond to what is in todayʼs “communications data” requests regarding who is calling whom, but any other sort of request, because of the extent to which content will have to be probed and because of the opportunities for linking separate streams of evidence, may have to counter as a “deeper” intrusion We recognise that warrants and the like will have to be issued in secret in order to avoid tipping off suspects. <-QUOTE}

{QUOTE-> Is it feasible to think of the targeted collection of communications data rather than collect it in respect of everybody?


At the moment CSPs retain communications data in respect of all of their customers – and this would not change under the Home Office proposals. One suggestion is that some selection of customers should be made; in effect that there would be a new class of request – for communications data to be held on a contingency basis. The CSP would be told the identity of the targeted person and would retain their communications data – however that data would only be released if there were a further request/authorisation.

This approach is consistent with the international standard established in the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention.52 This approach has some promising features, as well as some benefits from the perspective of costs. The problem is defining the criteria under which this new class of request would be issued. By definition it could only be on the vaguest of suspicions – otherwise there would be justification for actual immediate provision of communications data. There is then the potential that people complain that they have been placed on a watch list on entirely trivial grounds – writing a letter to a local paper asking for improved traffic control facilities outside a school, for example.

But our current situation is such that every citizen of the United Kingdom is on such a ʻwatchlistʼ and his or her communications are being preserved en masse. <-QUOTE}

I can see the government and internet providers screwing the Pay-As-You-Go services next!

[box750]

Either someone is really incompetent or they got their plan to tackle crime wrong. After all those CCTV, antiencryption laws, ASBOS and indefinite detention powers they still seem not to be able to bring crime down, at least as far as I know, Britain's crime rate is comparable to that of its European neighbours with a less intrusive surveillance society.

[I no more than U]

{QUOTE-> Either someone is really incompetent or they got their plan to tackle crime wrong. <-QUOTE}

Is it even about crime? I doubt it. It's much more likely about power and control. It's much better and easier to rule a country full of sheep. Of course, you can't turn men into sheep overnight. It takes a slow, steady campaign. It's always best to start with a new generation rather than one that's had a taste of freedom.

[Carver]

{QUOTE-> Is it even about crime? I doubt it. It's much more likely about power and control. It's much better and easier to rule a country full of sheep. Of course, you can't turn men into sheep overnight. It takes a slow, steady campaign. It's always best to start with a new generation rather than one that's had a taste of freedom. <-QUOTE}
It sounds like Mr Timms wants to increase that flock of Sheep http://www.cable.co.uk/news/mp-claims-broadband-is-essential-not-luxury-19425611/?

[trismegistos]

{QUOTE-> Is it even about crime? I doubt it. It's much more likely about power and control. It's much better and easier to rule a country full of sheep. Of course, you can't turn men into sheep overnight. It takes a slow, steady campaign. It's always best to start with a new generation rather than one that's had a taste of freedom. <-QUOTE}
I agree it's more about power and control.

OT:
We live in a kind of financial "Matrix" and people need to be aware more of what is going on outside this matrix that only few people are capable of seeing. Another apt description will be living inside a financial "bubble" ready to burst. As many people(behaving like sheep) seem to equate "Stock Market" as the economy. So when they see that the market stabilise or in the upswing, 'let the good times roll' or 'we have better days ahead' is what they see.

What made it worse is the decision of the Obama administration(Obama following the advice of his Quackonomics Illuminati ha ha) to pump trillions of dollars/mo to bail out the speculative or gambling or derivative debts instead of declaring bankruptcy for those banking institutions or simply writing off the debts as provided in their constitution's bankruptcy provisions. Expect for hyperinflation, as the speculators will increase the prices of oil, gold etc. The Human livestock will be bled to cachexia for the insatiable appetites of these Financial vampires.

China and Russia(the Gog and Magog accdg to the British-Israelists) are wise converting these huge amounts of pumped out dollars to actual Physical infrastructures creating a better Physical economies. While Tony Blair is getting excited to be installed as Emperor of the United States of Europe. lol

[Keyboard_Commando]

Police forces challenged over files held on law-abiding protesters

{QUOTE-> Chief constables will be forced to justify the legality of recording thousands of law-abiding protesters on secret nationwide databases, the government's privacy watchdog announced today.

Christopher Graham, the information commissioner, said he had "genuine concerns about the ever increasing amount" of personal data held by police. <-QUOTE}

{QUOTE-> Graham's move came after the Guardian revealed how police have developed a covert apparatus to monitor people they consider are, or could be, "domestic extremists", a term which has no legal basis.

Photographs and personal details of thousands of activists who attend demonstrations, rallies and political meetings are being stored on the databases. Surveillance officers are given so-called "spotter cards" to identify individuals who may "instigate offences or disorder" at demonstrations.

Alan Johnson, the home secretary, was today forced to defend the police for labelling protesters "domestic extremists". He said: "I haven't issued any guidance [to police] on the definition of that phrase. The police know what they are doing, they know how to tackle these demonstrations, they do it very effectively.

There were "far fewer" cases of animal rights extremism than in previous years, he said. "That's just one form of domestic extremism. If the police want to use that as a term, I certainly wouldn't fall to the floor clutching my box of Kleenex." <-QUOTE}

{QUOTE-> David Howarth, the Liberal Democrat justice spokesman, said that "an alphabet soup of agencies appears to have decided to put everyone in this country who protests about anything on a list of suspects".

"This is an example of mission creep, they have gone beyond their original intention of dealing with violent animal extremists" <-QUOTE}

{QUOTE-> Three units given the task of monitoring "domestic extremists" are run by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), including the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), which operates as a giant database of political activists. <-QUOTE}

source (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/26/police-challenged-protest-files)

also (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/25/police-domestic-extremists-database?CMP=AFCYAH)


--------------------------------------------------------

@ trismegistos, and OT chatter. It is probably not wise to mention any religious eschatology here, aka "End of times" discussions, etc. And also, there are many international users here @ this forum that might be offended by any mentioning of their homelands in such a fashion.

So lets just not go there. Please lol ;)